Right Down the Line
by snarkypants
Summary: What sane woman would leave Bones McCoy? No matter how thin you slice bologna, there's always two sides.


Right Down the Line by snarkypants

"Dr. McCoy, you have a communiqué from a Dr. Hrncir." Uhura didn't even stumble over the impenetrable Czech name, pronouncing it "hern-shur"; the girl knew her stuff.

Bones sat up from a sound sleep. "Oh, shit." He was on the couch in his new Chief Medical Officer's office, and all of the lights were on.

"I'll patch her through to Sick Bay."

"Can't you just tell her that I died?"

Her pause was so long that he knew he'd pissed her off; that's all Lucinda needed, an ally on his own damn ship. "You have obviously confused me with a secretary, Doctor."

"I'm sorry; you woke me up, and—"

"Here's your communiqué, Doctor," she said crisply and ended the connection.

-------------------------

There were better ways of spending one's rack time than jawing with the ex-wife through a communicator.

But some things were unavoidable, particularly when most of the fleet has been destroyed, when your own ship was only minutes away from that destruction, and said ex-wife was probably wondering where her next child support payment was coming from.

"Hey," she said, her lips compressing into the grimace they had assumed for all of their conversations during the last four years.

"Hey," he replied.

"You're alive," she said, smiling self-consciously at the inanity of her comment.

"Yeah, you might get to kill me after all."

"It'd be a toss-up between me and your liver."

He acknowledged that with a nod. "How's Jo? She doing all right?"

"Yeah, you want to talk to her?" She didn't wait for him to respond, but turned away from the screen and called. "Jojo, it's your dad."

He couldn't hear his daughter's part of the exchange, but his ex-wife's eyebrows went up.

"Jo_anna_. Your _father_ is on the _communicator_. _Now_." How many times had that tone been directed at him?

He could hear the heavy footfalls of a recalcitrant pre-adolescent; his ex-wife stood (she'd lost weight, he noticed), and Joanna plopped in front of the screen.

"Hi, Dad," she said.

_Dad?_ When had he stopped being Daddy?

"Hi, honey," he said, drinking in her altered appearance. Over the past few months her face had lost its baby plumpness, and she had cheekbones and an unexpectedly glamorous smile. Joanna's mother had started her on orthodontics over his objections, but since she paid for it and he wasn't there…well. He no longer had a say.

"How's the ship and everything?" she asked.

"We're still here," he said.

"We watched y'all on the news," Joanna said. "Mom got me out of bed, and we just watched it all night."

"That must have been boring," he said, trying to get another smile out of her.

"It was cool. I got to stay home from school." She shrugged.

"Then it was all worth it."

She snorted. She was his child all right, he thought.

"What are you studying right now?"

"Same old stuff. Math. Science. History." She shoved sleek, dark hair from her forehead with an impatient gesture; he recognized the impatience as his legacy, but the dark hair could have come from either parent.

"I figured _that_; what, specifically, in science?"

"We dissected a Rygelian trilobite."

"_Why?_" he asked, unable to prevent the curling of his lip, and she gave him a put-upon look, shrugging again.

"Well," he said after a moment's thought. "I guess it's a good early dissection project. There's only the two organs, and they're easy to identify."

"_Too_ easy," she said. "And they stink."

"Are all the history teachers still in love with the Reconstruction?"

"_Dad_, North American history is next year. We're doing _Federation_ history this year." She didn't roll her eyes at him, but her tone was scornful and it stung.

"Right, sorry."

He could just hear his ex-wife speaking off-screen, and Joanna bugged her eyes out at him, as if saying, "you see what I put up with?"

"What's that?" he asked.

"Oh, Mom just wants me to tell you some stuff about school."

"Then tell me."

She heaved a huge, long-suffering sigh. "It's nothing."

"Joanna Elizabeth, it is _not_ nothing." He could clearly hear the ex-wife that time.

"All right," Joanna said. "Geez." Her pale cheeks flushed. "I just got an award for my artificial intelligence project, that's all." She gave him a tiny, pleased smile, and a dimple in her cheek deepened. He didn't know where the dimples came from; neither he nor his ex-wife had them. They were all her own, and they had enchanted him from the moment he first held her, caterwauling for all she was worth and waving her tiny fists and kicking her froggy little legs.

"Artificial intelligence? Wow, that's… that's great," he said, painfully aware that his surprise sounded like a lack of enthusiasm.

"I know you don't like computery things," she said quickly.

"No, no, it's important. The math, the logic, it's important, no matter what you do," he said. Math, after all, was important to the study of chemistry if not biology, but he wasn't going to push medicine at her, at least not yet. Logic wasn't the be-all, end-all that some might think it, but adolescence was illogical enough already and she was going to need all the help she could get.

"I'm proud of you, my Jo."

"Thanks, Dad," she said. "Well, anyway, Mom wants to talk to you now."

Uh, really? "Okay. I love you, honey," he said.

"Loveyoutoodadbye," she said, and with a swing of her ponytail she was gone.

The ex-wife sat in front of the screen again; she had an odd expression on her face, and he tensed, waiting for it.

"She's as moody as a teenager these days," she said. "It's not just you."

"I thought we had a few more years," he said.

"She's always run ahead of schedule; why stop now?" She gave him a wry smile. "I'm glad you're all right, Len," she said.

He snorted, giving her a sour look. "Why?"

She paused for a few moments, during which he wondered if they had lost their audio connection. When she spoke, she didn't meet his gaze. "I thought you were dead, and there were too many things that I needed to tell you."

He sighed. "What did I do now?"

"I'm being serious, Len." She closed her eyes and took a breath. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I hurt you; I'll always regret it."

Once, the thought of her saying that had sustained him through Starfleet indoc and boot camp, through flights, through the countless indignities that the Academy had inflicted on him. He'd imagined her saying it, and he'd imagined laughing at her and telling her in the most precise anatomical terms just where to stick her regrets.

She wasn't stupid; she had to know how he'd react. She said it anyway.

Well, she was a ballsy girl, he'd always known that.

He just looked at her. "I can die in peace now. Thank you for that," he said, giving her a mocking little salute.

"I'd just like to be able to call you my friend again, someday."

He sat there, stunned. "Jesus, Luce." He cleared his throat. "What's all this about? Did you and Jerry split the sheets or something?"

She blinked, her expression blank. "Jerry?"

"You know, Jerry, my former friend and business partner, the cause of this whole shitty mess."

"Jerry…Len, I haven't even talked to him since you went off to the Academy. He wasn't the disease that broke us up; he was just a symptom."

"I wish you'd figured that out a few years ago, before the two of you took everything from me. My house, my practice, my kid, my wife, my best friend, _and_ my dog. I'm one train away from a goddamn C&W song here."

"Len, you were drunk all the time; I thought that it was because of the thing with, ah, your dad, but you wouldn't _talk_ to me. You didn't _want_ me. I was lonely and worried, and Jerry was lonely and worried, and…you could have lost your license…" She made a helpless little gesture that sat ill on a congenitally decisive woman. "That's no excuse for it, I know."

"Am I supposed to go down on one knee and thank god for this little epiphany?" He rubbed his forehead.

She flinched at his tone, but shook her head. "If you can accept my apology I'll be grateful. If not…I'll just hope that someday you can."

"I don't know what to say, Lucinda."

"Honestly, that's better than I'd hoped for," she said, and laughed her nervous laugh. "I don't expect anything of you, Len, other than continuing your legal obligations to Joanna." She looked at him almost shyly, as if they hadn't once explored every inch of the other's body, as if he hadn't seen her literal guts during the caesarean. "It would be nice to see you the next time you're planet-side, though, if you have time."

"Let me get this straight," he said sternly, and she tensed. "There would be coffee and kolaches involved in this visit, correct?"

She relaxed and grinned at him. "I was thinking biscuits and Red-Eye gravy, but kolaches could be arranged."

"This probably won't change anything," he said in a warning tone of voice.

"I know. I'm just so grateful that you're still alive for me to try; the world's a better place with you in it."

"Technically, I'm not _in_ the world at the moment."

She made an exasperated noise, but the look on her face was indulgent. "Yankee damn lawyer."

"Well, I'm _not_."

They ended the conversation on friendlier terms than he would have thought possible just a few weeks prior.

-------------------------

"What did you do to piss Uhura off?"

"I tried to get her to run interference with my ex."

Jim cackled. "Ouch. Communications officers hate that."

"I know," Bones said.

"Especially the female ones."

"I know! I was at the same damned lecture, Jim."

"You'd better do something to make it up to her, Uhura, I mean. She could make your life a living hell."

"Since when did you become so expert in the care and feeding of communications officers?"

"Think about it: you could have a sweet thing in your quarters, and at a _very_ _crucial moment_ she patches in the ex-wife and kid without warning. 'Oh, Mommy, what's Daddy doing?'" Kirk piped in a high, girlish falsetto.

"I don't have 'sweet things' in my quarters," Bones said. "Unlike you I'm not trying to nail every sentient being in the galaxy."

"You're a doctor, not a gigolo," Jim said in a very bad southern accent.

"Jim, do I come to your job and slap the dick out of your mouth?"

"There's the old curmudgeon I know and love," Jim said. "There's a bottle of hooch around here, isn't there?"

"There's a bottle of _bourbon_."

"Yeah, what'd I say?"

It was pointless to explain to Kirk the subtleties of single-barrel, twelve-year-old bourbon. Bones sighed and retrieved the bottle and two glasses from the cabinet.

Jim tossed back his shot and smacked his lips. "Not bad. What'd the old ball and chain want anyway?"

"To apologize." Bones laughed shortly, shaking his head in bemusement. He swirled the bourbon around the glass before drinking.

Jim's eyes went wide. "Leonard Horatio McCoy, do you know what this means? This is a very special time in a young man's life, and I am honored to be present." He made a smarmy face, which is like saying that daVinci made some pictures; it was his true medium. "It's right up there with your first boner, or getting your hands in a girl's pants for the first time." He stood, preparing to declaim:

"Bones, my man, my bestest buddy, you have just received your first interstellar booty call."

"Shut the fuck up." He said it mildly, though.

"Okay. But if I were you, I'd up my vitamin intake before going planet-side, just to be safe. B-12 is said to be particularly effective."

"You should know," Bones said.

"Maybe I should tag along with you, help you protect your virtue."

Bones raised the glass to his lips just as a thought chilled him: in seven years his daughter would be of an age that Jim Kirk would consider fair game. He bolted the remainder of the glass. Perhaps it wasn't too early to start inuring her to Kirk's particular brand of charm, like periodic booster vaccinations. "What the hell, at least I don't think I'll ever catch you screwing my wife."

Jim shrugged, grinning. "I dunno. What's she look like?" The grin faded from his face at the look Bones gave him. "Sorry, Bones. Too soon?"

"She only likes smart guys, kid."

"Counts both of us out, huh?" Jim poured another round for each of them.

Bones snorted and took a sip of his bourbon.

"So, you gonna do it?" Jim asked.

"Do what?"

"Go see her."

"I'm going to see my _daughter_ and since she's a minor I'll probably be forced to see the ex-wife at the same time."

"Uh-_huh_," Kirk said, wearing a maddeningly innocent expression.

"What does that mean?"

"Nothing, nothing!" He grinned, grabbed the bottle of bourbon, and took a swig.

"Ech, do you have to do that?" Bones asked, grimacing with distaste.

"Jesus, I'll wipe it off. Such an old woman." Kirk wiped the neck of the bottle with his shirt, which itself was of dubious cleanliness. When he tried to hand the bottle back Bones waved him off; this was probably Jim's intent all along.

"So how long before you're knockin' boots with the ex?" Jim asked, making Bones choke on his drink. Jim laughed, thumping Bones on the back.

-------------------------

Along with his bourbon, he nursed a fantasy of maybe, someday, tumbling into his old bed with the woman he married, while their daughter slept contentedly downstairs. Almost the way things ought to be.

Sometimes the fantasy ended with him giving her a blistering set-down, a truly green-blooded account of her deficiencies as a bed partner and a woman.

Sometimes the fantasy ended with breakfast.

A/N: What sane woman would leave Bones? He's a woobie! That's the train of thought that got me started on this, anyway. But no matter how thin you slice bologna there's always two sides, and the stock "bitchy ex-wife" character doesn't interest me.

When I was writing this, I was aware that "Joanna" is a canon-ish character, but "Jocelyn McCoy" is more fanon than anything else. So I made up a different ex-wife for the different universe. Don't flame me for the mistake; it was intentional.

If you squint, you can see slashy potential between Kirk and McCoy, but I think that can be said of any scene between Kirk and anyone.


End file.
